Today's Access Networks (ANs) are designed primarily for individual usage. Usage examples include: an Intranet/Internet user ‘surfing the web’, an business user using corporate email, a user of a public cellular network making a Telephony call, or a user of a private system making a one-to-one private push-to-talk (PTT) call. The ANs that serve these individuals typically prioritize each user individually with respect to network resources, and the prioritization is made statically (i.e. the user's prioritization does not normally change during a session). For example in 3GPP R8 LTE, individual users are prioritized statically in the Home Subscriber Server (HSS). Changes to a user's priority are typically initiated by the system administrator (e.g. in response to a subscription change).
Within today's Access Networks (i.e. wired and wireless networks), group services, such as ‘chat’, ‘instant messaging’, ‘conference bridges’, and ‘group push-to-talk’, are increasing in popularity. Group services (i.e. one or more users sharing one or more applications) are growing in number. Several problems arise when individual network prioritization is used with group services: media streams associated with one or more group members using a group service may become unreliable or unintelligible (e.g. a broken audio stream in a VoIP conference), one or more members may be dropped from an in-progress group service (e.g. a user falls out of a group push-to-talk call), a lower priority individual user may not to be able to join an in-progress group service (e.g. a person can't get network resources to be able to join a wireless instant messaging service).
Previous methods of access network resource prioritization are insufficient for group applications, inasmuch as group applications (and all associated individuals) must be able to adapt their priority level at once. Various use cases exist that demonstrate how a group service can over time change scope and priority, and that prior art techniques are not sufficient to address these needs.
In a first case, subscription based HSS/HLR/AAA Provisioning simply provides static provisioning of a user as a high priority or ‘gold’ user, but doesn't account for the dynamic priority nature of a group application, e.g. the ‘gold’ user (sharing a commercial wireless network) is part of a taxi group dispatch service, and after an accident, the ‘gold’ user needs to signal that the group is in a state of emergency and should receive elevated AN priority.
In a second case, service-based application prioritization can prioritize all flows associated with one application above all other flows from another application. However, this is insufficient because a group session will likely use many applications, e.g. a professor may administer an online lecture while using a VoIP conference and an application sharing program. Because the group session involves multiple applications, individual application prioritization is insufficient (i.e. the entire group session is useless if only one application is received by students). This example further illustrates that applications can be combined in a group communications environment and that priority should be given to the overall task or group.
Accordingly, what is needed is a technique to allow network priority to be applied dynamically to a group of users (i.e. priority for the group of users can be changed mid-call or mid-session). It would also be of benefit to dynamically assign users to groups by application
Skilled artisans will appreciate that common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are typically not depicted or described in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention.